For just more than a year, U.S. Army Col. Joseph Felter traveled around Afghanistan in a role his supervisors described as "a directed telescope." His job: go to the different provinces and neighborhoods in Afghanistan, talk to military personnel at all levels, and report back with his observations and conclusions directly to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed Afghan operations until June 2010, and then Gen. David Petraeus, who took over McChrystal's post.

Felter says the experience provided critical insight into what was happening in Afghanistan, and what was working, or not, with the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. He found that the most effective units were those that understood the population with whom they were living and could work closely with local security forces. "Counterinsurgency is such a local enterprise," he says. 

For instance, one area might be dominated by a single tribe, which would mean that U.S. aid and assistance would benefit the entire population. Another might have competing tribes or power brokers; aid could potentially empower one group or individual over the other. Village stability required that U.S. forces and the young unit leaders recognized and managed the difference. "The complexity of the threat environment is so extraordinary," he says.

Now Felter will be using his analytic skills in a different sort of role. In September, he will join the Center for International Security and Cooperation as a senior research scholar, bringing his expertise in counterinsurgency, special operations, terrorism, and conflict to bear on research conducted alongside scholars from Stanford and other major universities across the country.

His primary project, the Empirical Studies of Conflict program, which he co-directs with Princeton's Jacob Shapiro, will collect, disseminate, and analyze conflict data from a variety of nations including Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, the Philippines, Northern Ireland, and Pakistan. He says he hopes the program, funded by a five-year, $8.6 million grant from the Defense Department, will help make reliable, difficult-to-obtain, or once-classified data about conflict and insurgencies available to the academic community, which has the resources and tools to analyze it effectively.

The project, now in its third year, has already yielded some important and even counter-conventional insights. Felter and other scholars have found, for instance, that in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, high rates of unemployment are not necessarily associated with greater political violence. Research also showed that in conflict-ridden nations, small monetary aid projects that focus primarily on localized populations tend to have a far greater effect on reducing violence than big gifts, which can lead instead to corruption and graft."Felter will build and lead a research program on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, working closely with CISAC scholars and others from around Stanford.

One source of data for the ESOC project is the Sinjar records, which Felter has described as a cache of more than 700 files discovered in Northwest Iraq that detail the origins of the fighters al Qaeda in Iraq brought to the country to combat coalition forces. In an essay for Foreign Policy earlier this year, Felter and a co-author said the data collected from these files revealed that "at least 111 Libyans entered Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007" and that the "vast majority" of them came from the region where the rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi is centered. The Sinjar documents, they conclude, "suggest some ideas for how we might best respond to the country's civil war and its aftermath."

At CISAC, Felter will build and lead a research program on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, working closely with CISAC scholars and others from around Stanford. In one project, he plans to draw on data on insurgencies in the Philippines that date back to the mid-1970s. This research will also be informed by his on-the-ground military experience there. Both before and after Sept. 11, he served as a liaison between the U.S. embassy and the armed forces of the Philippines, and supported efforts to rescue hostages being held by terrorist groups. He had previously earned a Master of Public Administration degree from Harvard, with a focus on negotiation and conflict resolution, and with a team of Harvard-trained experts, he also worked on the peace process with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

From a scholarly perspective, he says, the country is particularly interesting because of the diversity in types of insurgents, as well as the government's responses to the threat.

In some ways, Felter's CISAC appointment is a homecoming. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he was awarded, while still serving in the army, a PhD in political science at Stanford in 2005. His dissertation examined how the quality and structure of internal state security forces affected their ability to combat insurgency and terrorist organizations. 

That year, he returned to West Point to direct the Combating Terrorism Center, where one of his goals was to encourage the declassification, where possible, of top-quality information about terrorist networks so it could be analyzed by the academic community. He also continued his work overseas. During his tenure in the army, he has served with a light infantry unit on the DMZ in Korea, participated in the 1989 invasion of Panama as an army Ranger, and later transferred to Special Forces, where his missions tended to be several months in duration and entailed capacity-building exercises for local governments and militaries.

These missions tended to emphasize the importance of learning and understanding local cultures and languages, and in this role, he worked with special forces in Indonesia, in southern Thailand to help the military against a low-level insurgency, and in the north to interdict the drug trade there.

His goal now is to bring some of these experiences to research that might aid understanding of political violence and terrorism. In Congressional testimony in 2007, he noted that a terrorist organization once published an online book entitled 39 Ways to Participate in Jihad. He argued that the U.S. must create at least as many "opportunities for Americans with a wide array of expertise to quietly participate in the fight against terrorism." Among them: academics, "who have critical expertise on Jihadi theology and the history, sociology and political context of the current fight."